Ubuntu denouement

In the short interlude between trips, I turned my attention back to
updating Ubuntu on my laptop.
Fighting off a nasty cold, I dug back into 18.04 last night.

I started by trying to assure myself that I could live with the
limitations of the Nouveau drivers. I
couldn’t. They just consistently didn’t handle multiple monitors
successfully. I figured I could maybe live with only a single external
monitor, but I’m not prepared to go back to just the laptop LCD.

This is definitely rock/hard place territory. I can’t afford to run
an out-of-date OS indefinitely and I’m not really prepared to replace
my entire laptop in a couple of days between two trips.

Running software update revealed that the Nvidia drivers had
changed. Not quite remembering the details from a week ago, I
started poking around at various discussions of how to install them.

For whatever reason, the “390” drivers seem to work fine now. I got a
glitch once, but only once so far. There’s an unrelated
issue
with my Epson scanner. None of the proposed solutions worked for me,
but I can manage for a bit.

Emacs and email (Exim and
DavMail) and VirtualBox
and Docker
and Chrome and Firefox
and Java and,
well, all the things I’ve remembered to try are working
fine. Mostly, I think I’ve got everything sorted. I should probably
still carry the backup drive with me for this trip though.